Do you need a fantastic tech guru? Who’s a woman? And knows non-profits?
InterAction recently hosted a roundtable on the ROI of social media. The presenter, Allyson Kapin, was excellent. She founded Women Who Tech, which brings to together and empowers women in technology, which is absolutely necessary right now. I want to go to their next event! If you want to take your organization beyond interns on Twitter, hire her.
The most important thing I learned from her at the roundtable was that nonprofits should be involved in social media (Facebook, Twitter) for branding purposes only at this time. Social media does not have enough results on return on investment to prove the time invested will get you volunteers or fundraising dollars. Just set up your accounts on the services and get started to get your name out there and in front of the next generation of volunteers and donors. That is all you can expect at this point, but it is necessary. It’s about presence and branding. Also, don’t build your own SM network on your site – go where the people are, like LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, whatever SM site may be popular internationally where your partners are, etc.
She did get us started on Social Media Metrics 101:
- Measure Click-Through Rates: On links to action alerts, online fundraising campaigns, blog posts, latest studies, etc. You can track CTR’s by setting up unique urls/landing pages back to your websites or calls to actions.
- Review your website referrals through a web stats package such as Google Analytics. What percentage of traffic is coming from social media sites you have an active presence on?
- Number of friends/fans/followers on a particular social network.
And for the more advanced:
- Bit.ly: A URL shortener that tracks information such as number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur. http://www.Bit.ly
- Xinureturns: Provides a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media.
- Run a report and you will receive information on Technorati, Google, Diggs, and links back to your website. http://www.xinureturns.com/
- PostRank: Provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content. http://www.postrank.com/
- SocialToo: A comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social media stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter. http://socialtoo.com/
- Summize.com: Tracks topics and hashtags, twitter user names, and top trends on twitter.
- RSS Feeds: You can setup RSS feeds on social networks like Twitter, Digg, Flickr, etc.
- Yahoo Pipes: You can create your own monitoring tools using Yahoo Pipes which lets you quickly set up your own RSS tracking, complete with filters. http://www.pipes.yahoo.com/